Today is commencement day at Wellesley. It is indeed a day of celebrations. As I was walking from the location, where we all have been asked to park, to my office, I could see the proud parents and relatives of graduates walking towards the tent to get the best possible seats. This year, because of the weather, the ceremonies will be held under a tent. That didn’t seem to damper the enthusiasm of the visitors.
For those who are graduating, about 569 this year, Congratulations on your achievements at the College! I hope you all received the best education in not just the academics, but also about life. I sure hope that we, from Library and Technology Services supported you through this journey well. Initial indications from the senior survey appears that we did well.
I want to thank all the LTS student employees (I believe 39 of them) who are graduating today for their hard work and excellent contributions over the past years that they worked for us. We cannot do our work well without our student employees! (more…)
There is no day that passes where we don’t hear about hacking of one kind or the other. The most prevalent ones are phishing attacks because they are easy to carry out and the dividends for the hackers are pretty high. Here is another link that shows more statistics on phishing. Please note that the statistics probably are way underestimating the reality because they are generally based on surveys. Since there are no legal requirements to report a phishing attack unless there has been compromises involving personally identifiable information, there is no other database of phishing attacks.
Because of the advances in operating systems and other tools such as antivirus, malware & spyware protection as well as local firewalls, personal computing devices have become much harder to invade directly, unless of course, for a variety of reasons (including the cost of virus protection software), someone decides not to install and run these protection tools. In addition, browsers have become sophisticated in helping protect our information. Again, it requires some effort in terms of updating the browser and sometimes installing additional extensions etc. I strongly recommend you reading “Securing Your Browser” from US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team), however, use your discretion in reading this given that this is from the US government which has a strong surveillance program. May be a few of their recommendations are to help them gather your information 🙂
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